A Few Minutes with Patrick, Field Technician

You have to provide moral support and technical support at the same time

I like troubleshooting computers. I like fixing issues. I’ve been tinkering with computers my whole life basically. I grew up with Windows 98 and early Macs. I’ve been doing it so long, working on computers seems to come naturally to me.

Patrick started with Bryley in September 2021 and is working at his A+ and Network+ certificates with a vision to achieving an engineering degree. Patrick attended Porter & Chester Institute for Computer and Network Technology. Following are Patrick’s thoughts about his role excerpted from a recent conversation:

Right now I’ve been involved in Microsoft 365 migrations. We’ve been migrating from stand-alone email clients to M365. The nice thing about M365 is everything’s integrated — you don’t need to remember separate accounts; it will all be linked through Active Directory. It streamlines the whole process. It gives both security and ease-of-use benefits, that once you sign into your account you have access to all the Microsoft products.

And you’ve got to be really careful in these migrations; you want to keep things consistent and easy for the end-user, so you don’t disrupt their workflow. To do it right, you really have to spend the time with each user: making sure they can log in, making sure everything’s working for them, making sure nothing’s missing. More often than not you have worried employees asking, ‘am I going to have this? am I going to have that? is it going to be the same?’ And you have to provide moral support and technical support at the same time. But once the migration process is done, everything is pretty smooth.

At an MSP (a Managed Service Provider, like Bryley) I can always count on a variety of work. I like being able to work with different clients, work on different issues on different systems. Yesterday I worked on something completely different from today. That makes it a little challenging, but I’m up for the challenge. I like to be able to learn new things about each network setup. I like projects that allow me to stretch under the more senior techs’ supervision. I love new products and advances in technology as a whole. When something new comes out, I’ll dive right in on my own time and start learning it.

I’ve been told by some people here that when there’s something that needs to be fixed and it’s an unusual problem, a lot of times I’ll be the one with a solution for it. I’ll be able to fix it. ADHD can be destructive, but part of it lets me look at things a little differently – I can hyper-focus on one thing until I’ve figured it out. Being here at Bryley focusing on problem-solving clients’ computers, it’s been an asset. It’s got to be partly why I’m pretty good at what I do.